Psycho-social restraints not readily perceptible,
acceptance of the status quo is a kind of serfdom,
a backward stumble into realms just minimally human,
and that have the energetics of a field of alfalfa.
It is as if one were a cow, as totally complacent, a characteristic to be avoided.
It is especially uncalled for where a paradigm shift is impending.
Tides, natural as those with which the moon is complicit
are in synchrony with the flow of steam through radiators,
blood through veins, the rhythms of sleep and of consciousness.
It is our fate to be in contention.
It is the reason we ate that garden’s fruit in the first place,
why we aspired to build a tower so tall
its arial poked holes in the ionosphere.
But to have denied the impulse
was to have remained a child.
That entire story is an allegory
of escape from the undifferentiated state.
Everything thus progresses
from the general to the specific.
Complexity follows simplicity as surely
as the number of choices increase,
and mutation, as a means of survival,
results in a multiplication of genes and their proteinaceous productions.
Even the syntax of our sentences becomes a kind of maze
that we must be at pains to disentangle.
We should therefore be alert to changes
in status, in relationships, even in those political configurations
we had imagined to be stable, to be set, so to speak, in the stones,
thus to flow with the roll of the landscape,
to be improved as well as to enervate,
specifically, to be amongst those who are to make a difference.
So at the first sign of impending crisis,
be not one who retreats into silence,
the bystander, the unmoving non-participatory observer.
For your voice is necessary. Raise it. Shout if you are able.
Even the risk of failure, scorn, imprisonment, should not engender hesitation.
That is the moral imperative.